Monday, October 13, 2014

Happy Columbus Day

I will confess that there are things that make it somewhat difficult to celebrate the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. Things like his mistakes in navigation, his enslavement of natives, and the bringing of European diseases to the Americas, among other things, come to mind. History is rarely a simple endorsement in full of everything anyone did. It's like we're all sinners or something.

And then, quite frankly, I do a little bit of thinking, and I remember that many of the "natives" were engaged in constant warfare and human sacrifice (e.g. Aztecs, Mayas, Pawnee, Incas), and that those diseases were going to come to the Americas sooner or later, as the English did find the Grand Banks off eastern Canada for fishing not long after Columbus--which was why Samoset was able to be kidnapped by them and develop a taste for beer while a slave.

And so, with the coming of true religion to this hemisphere and the end of constant wars to feed human sacrifice, I have to say something very politically incorrect; a lot of the natives had it far better under Spanish rule.

Now that's their right if they like, and therefore it's my right--being descended mostly from the tribes victimized by the pre-Christian Norsemen--to point out that we're really a lot better off since the Vikings stopped worshipping Thor, Odin, and the like. So if you're thinking of taking a trip with Amaruk, maybe consider what those ViQueens did when the party got out of hand, eh?

Happy Columbus Day. Happy end of legal human sacrifice in the Americas!

It wasn't a hoax in the sense that it was a false claim of what happened, but she was the victim of a trollish sort of con.

That said, yeah, the awful evil of this world is that when peoples have contact on isolated continents, really bad stuff happens. But I think it's kind of good that the Aztec civilization was wiped out, and that it didn't actually require all the Aztec people being wiped out.

The even better news about that is that though it doesn't appear to have been a real tour company, the owners did incorporate, and hence their mis-deeds ought to come before a court. Which will risk their real business, which apparently is some kind of homosexual smut.

Agreed that it's good Aztec culture is gone, as well as that of the Vikings. And hopefully soon, that of neo-Viking peddlers of who knows what perversity.

At least to a degree. My step-dad, of Swedish descent, notes that a lot of his ancestors were born 5 months after the wedding. Apparently the Norse tradition of taking one's prospective wife out for a test drive survived conversion, or what passed as conversion at least.

But good point. The same thing goes for all of Latin America and Europe, really, as well as good chunks of Africa and Asia.